A main service of drugstores is to select drugs or medicines from many types of stocked drugs according to a doctor's prescription and to provide the selected drugs to patients. Conventionally, this kind of work has been done by hand whereby pharmacists have taken out drugs while looking through the prescription.
However, the selection of drugs by hand involves troublesome tasks, so automation has been desired. Especially in large hospitals or the like, it would take considerable time to receive drugs after examination because of crowded drugstores, and thus, an improvement has been desired.
Therefore, the inventors formerly developed devices capable of automatically selecting and filling of drugs, and filed patent applications listed below.
Patent Document 1: JP 2001-130504 A
Patent Document 2: JP 2001-287702 A
Patent Document 3: JP 2001-294305 A
Patent Document 4: JP 2002-29501 A
Patent Document 5: JP 2002-29511 A
Drug filling apparatuses disclosed in the above-mentioned patent documents each include a prescription ordering section, a drug supplying section, a drug halting section, a drug conveying section, and a drug filling section. A drug dispenser is incorporated in the drug halting section.
The apparatuses described above send out a predetermined number of drugs from the drug supplying section to temporarily accumulate in a drug dispenser. Then, the drugs accumulated in the dispenser are sequentially conveyed via the drug conveying section to the drug filling section to fill the drugs in a container such as a vial.
More specifically, the prescription ordering section is a section inputting information of doctor's prescription. The drug supplying section has a plurality of drug feeders, in each of which a large drug storage receptacle storing drugs is attached.
The apparatuses described in the patent documents store various kinds of drugs in drug storage receptacles in the drug supplying section. Inputting of information of a prescription in the prescription ordering section operates the drug feeder corresponding to the predetermined drug storage receptacle to send out a predetermined number of drugs from the drug storage receptacle.
The drugs sent out are temporarily accumulated in the drug dispenser via a common passage.
Herein, the drug dispenser is provided with a shutter at its bottom. The closed shutter accumulates the drugs within the dispenser, whereas the opened shutter drops down the drugs at once into the drug conveying section of the next process. Then, as described above, the drug conveying section conveys the drugs to the drug filling section, so as to fill the drugs in a container such as a vial after confirmation of weight of the drugs.
The reason why drugs are conveyed by the drug conveying section after being temporarily accumulated in this way is that conveyance of drugs complete for the predetermined amount sequentially proceeds in parallel with a plurality of discharge of drugs because discharge of drugs from the drug supplying section requires much more time than other processes among those in filling drugs.